The professor who completed his four-year tenure as vice-chancellor of Aliah University on Tuesday was back in his lab at Jadavpur University on Wednesday in the company of his research students.
Mahammad Ali had said that Jadavpur University was the place where he wanted to be since being humiliated by student leaders when he was VC of Aliah University in early April.
“I am relieved to have joined JU. The past few days have been extremely traumatic. I want to remain immersed in research to overcome the trauma,” Ali told The Telegraph.
A professor of chemistry at JU, Ali spent the entire day in his lab in the analytical chemistry building. Ali took “a lien” from JU to become the VC of Aliah University in 2018.
On Sunday, he had requested the minority affairs and madrasah education department not to extend his tenure as VC beyond April 12.
Abu Taher Kamruddin, president of the West Bengal Board of Madrasah Education, has been appointed interim VC of Aliah University.
Kamruddin will helm the university till a full-term VC is appointed, said the minister for minority affairs and madrasah education, Ghulam Rabbani.
“Since the governor is not sending the name of his nominee, a search committee could not be formed,” the minister said.
Ali, who had turned up on the Aliah campus on Monday, 10 days after he was abused allegedly by Trinamul Congress student leaders and a day before the completion of his tenure as VC, told this newspaper that he wanted to move on and return to JU to start afresh.
On Wednesday afternoon, he was shuttling between his two instrument labs and a wet lab.
At one of the instrument labs, Ali was working on a project funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB).
In between, he was guiding PhD students in the wet lab.
“A presentation has to be made for the project very soon. I believe work is the best therapy to get rid of the traumatic experience. Here I am amid the company of students who respect me and want to learn from me,” said Ali.
A video showing a youth whom Ali identified as Giyasuddin Mondal, a former president of the Aliah University unit of the Trinamul Congress Chhatra Parishad (TMCP), gesticulating at and verbally abusing him was widely circulated on social media on April 2.
“They are our students? Can they behave like this? Can they tell a VC that ‘we will slap you’, ‘box your ears’. I could not take it any more,” Ali had told a news channel on April 4.
“The torment that I faced at the end of my tenure concerns me because it happened despite my efforts to bring discipline on the campus. I had the student leader, who was arrested following an incident on April 1, expelled in 2019. I tried to bring Aliah University out of the grasp of campus unrest.”
The university had expelled Giyasuddin, a student of engineering, and four other students in April 2019 for a year for allegedly creating unrest on the campus.
